Over 33 million gallons bypassed

Jun. 29, 2008 11:00 PM

Written by

The Reporter

Like a fortress, the City of Fond du Lac's Wastewater Treatment Plant stood surrounded by rising water the night of June 12.

Three operators and the operations engineer were on duty and a crew of four maintenance workers was standing by.

And the rain that kept coming made operations manager John Leonhard nervous. He was watching the situation from his home, using a remote monitor.

"I can tell you I was very happy that night, (knowing) we had a new treatment plant," he said.

In the end, a total of 33.69 million gallons of treated water was bypassed into Lake Winnebago through the river system.

"To give you some kind of scale, over three days, June 12-14, we treated 121.86 million gallons. That's what we normally pump in about 19 days," Leonhard said.

Located on North Doty Street next to the Fond du Lac River, the plant is set up on ground higher than its surroundings and encased in a berm.

In operation since July 2006, the new facility can handle about 65 million gallons of water each day, compared to the 34 million gallon capacity of the former plant. The wastewater treatment plant has its own retention pond and storm-water pumping station.

The night the city became flooded, all six pumps were working at full capacity, trying their best to pump out the city's 250 miles of sewer, Leonhard said.

He's been at the job 24 years and even he, the overseer of sewer water, had never seen anything like the 7.5 inches of rain that — in a short amount of time — had inundated the city and the system.

"Think of our collection system as a big funnel, and every home is draining into this funnel, and at some point, it just starts to fill up because the funnel can't let all the water through," he said of what happens when the treatment plant has to bypass the system.

As the river crested and poured over its banks, flooding Doty Street with 4½ feet of water, the staff had to be ferried in from the Pick 'n Save parking lot on West Scott Street, Leonhard said.

"There was flooding up to our gates," he said.

Pollutants carried in the water were only one one-hundredth of a percent, and the rest was pure water, he said.

"Even what backed up in people's basements, that was almost all water. It was very diluted," Leonhard said.

Through the sequence of storms that moved through the area, beginning with Walleye Weekend, June 6-8, and the deluge that occurred less than a week later, the treatment plant was still able to meet its discharge permit requirements, Leonhard said.